Tim Sutton said when his son was pulled over one night for crossing the yellow line while turning, officers repeatedly tried to get his son to let them search his car.

Sutton, an Alamance County commissioner, said Burlington police officers alleged they smelled alcohol inside 25-year-old Jonathan Sutton’s car, and in addition to requiring Jonathan Sutton to take a roadside sobriety test and asking him to take a chemical analysis — which he refused — they persisted in asking him to consent to a search. Sutton said an officer asked his son, “If you have nothing to hide, why don’t you let us search your car?”

Sutton said his son was leaving work after 2 a.m., when the business — which serves alcohol — had closed. Jonathan told officers he hadn’t been drinking and did well on roadside testing, Sutton said.

“In my opinion, they delayed him long enough to bring in a drug dog,” Sutton said, which, within a reasonable amount of time, police are entitled to do. He said the stop lasted about 20 minutes.

He said the dog didn’t alert to any drugs in his son’s car, and eventually police had to let his son go — without writing a ticket or making an arrest.

Sutton said his son understood his right to refuse to consent to a police search of his vehicle without probable cause, but others, unaware of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, may feel they have to oblige an officer’s every request.

SEARCH AND SEIZURE law, based on the Fourth Amendment, isn’t any simple topic with black and white answers. There are times when officers are entitled under the law to search a person’s home or car regardless of consent, and there are times when a driver or resident’s consent is practically an officer’s only ticket inside.

David Remington, a defense attorney in Alamance County, said the problem is that most people don’t know they’re entitled to refuse a search conducted without a warrant or probable cause.

“People never know their rights,” Remington said. “They don’t know their rights, they don’t exercise them, and officers do take advantage of their ignorance.”

Steven Friedland, a professor at the Elon University School of Law, said under the Supreme Court’s motor vehicle exception, an officer doesn’t have to have a warrant to search a mobile vehicle if he has probable cause to believe there is contraband inside.

But according to Alamance County District Attorney Pat Nadolski, it would be extremely difficult to come up with an exhaustive list of situations that give an officer probable cause to search a vehicle.

In general, an officer has probable cause to search a vehicle if contraband is in plain view, if he smells marijuana coming from the car, or if he sees an open container of alcohol inside the vehicle. Otherwise, an officer could search the vehicle with consent from the driver, if he had a search warrant for the vehicle, if an officer is conducting an inventory search after impounding a car, if the search was incident to arrest — which allows the officer only to search the area immediately around the arrestee, where the person could retrieve a weapon or destroy evidence, for example — or in an exigent circumstance, where there is reason to believe evidence could be destroyed or a person could pose a danger to the officer or someone else. Exigent circumstances typically apply only to searches of residences.

Page 2 of 4 - “That’s why it becomes a question of fact,” Nadolski said. “Does it rise to the level of probable cause? And there’s no easy answer to that.”

He said the District Attorney’s office has a staff member on call at all times to receive and answer questions from law enforcement officers on what is permissible under the law.

Friedland said if an officer receives a tip that someone has drugs in his car, that information could rise to the level of probable cause and warrant a search of the vehicle.

WHEN IT COMES to searches of residences, the law is less flexible. With the exception of an exigent circumstance, in most situations officers must have a search warrant for the house or receive consent from the resident before coming in.

Judge Jim Roberson, chief district court judge in Alamance County, said few situations are the same when it comes to determining exigency, and factors officers must articulate are often both objective and subjective.

“(If an officer says), ‘I opened the door and was knocked down by the smell of marijuana,’ that’s an objective sort of thing,” Roberson said. “The subjective part is the officer analyzing whether he feels like (evidence) would be gone,” and whether he has the means to secure the scene for investigative purposes, he said.

Remington said he received a call from one of his clients during a traffic stop one time, and officers had told the woman they were going to her house to search it, despite not having a warrant.

Remington declined to say which law enforcement agency conducted the stop, but said his client had just picked up her child from the school bus and was pulled over after officers told her they received an anonymous tip that there was cocaine in the vehicle.

He said the officers had a drug-sniffing dog walk around the perimeter of her vehicle — which was lawful — and the dog alerted at the front left wheel, where officers found a hide-a-key box with “a residual amount of cocaine powder” on it.

“They tell her they’re going to her house to do a search of her home and there’s nothing she can do about it,” Remington said.

He said the client kept him on the phone the entire time, and she arrived back at her house where the homeowner — who was the woman’s mother — also told officers they couldn’t come in. The woman told officers she had her attorney on the phone, who said they couldn’t conduct the search.

“I heard the officer say, ‘I don’t give a (expletive) who you got on the phone,’” Remington said.

Remington said the officers did find illegal activity in the house and went to a magistrate — “who was appalled as well” about the circumstances of the search — but ended up not charging the woman.

Page 3 of 4 - “A violation of state law is one thing, but to violate the law of the land to get a conviction on a state law violation — who is the worst lawbreaker in that case?” Remington said.

BURLINGTON POLICE CHIEF Jeffrey Smythe, in response to Sutton’s criticism of the traffic stop conducted by his department, said that an officer asking multiple times for consent to search a vehicle wouldn’t be a violation of the law.

“It’s completely possible we would ask more than once,” he said. “Realistically, it comes down to there’s a bright line drawn in constitutional law of when police use coercion to obtain a search. But asking in a professional manner two or three or four or five times doesn’t cross that line.”

Remington said that often, people believe if they tell an officer he or she can search the vehicle, the officer won’t actually conduct a search, but that is rarely the case.

“If you say ‘yes’ to a cop, they’re searching,” he said.

He said when asked the simple question of “Do you mind if I search your vehicle?” people can easily respond by saying they do mind.

“If they’ve got a right to come in, they’re coming in,” Remington said. “If they’ve got a right to get in your car, they’re going in your car. But don’t give them that right.”

Smythe said if someone is unsure of whether an officer has a right to conduct a search, he or she should simply ask whether they’re absolutely required to oblige.

“I think that you just need to ask the police officer, ‘Do I have to let you do this?’” Smythe said. “They’re on camera, and they know that they’re being recorded. An officer is always going to tell the truth.”

Nadolski and Roberson said even if a person believes he is exercising his Fourth Amendment right to refuse a search without a search warrant and isn’t under the impression that officers have probable cause, that person can still be arrested for resisting the officer.

Roberson said if an officer is actually conducting a search without probable cause, that a judge will determine that in court.

“If an officer is resisted (during a search), the officer can handle it just like any other resist,” Roberson said. “Then, it’s sorted out later in court by suppressing the evidence if it was improper.”

Smythe said a judge “is always the one who verifies our exigency” when officers act without a search warrant.

It’s a matter of “how hard they want to push,” Smythe said. “They can push too hard and get arrested, or if they don’t push and want to complain, complain, by all means. If we violated the law, sue us.”